Tag: Political Correctness

«Quand le politiquement correct réécrit les classiques» (When political correctness rewrites the classics) FIGAROVOX/ANALYSIS, 8th January 2018. To avoid showing the death of a woman, the opera Carmen has been rewritten. Welcome to the era of thought-policing through art.

There is no such thing as the non-tribal condition. When postmodern Man boasts of having gone through the process of ‘de-tribalization’ to become a ‘citizen of the world’, he fails to notice that induction into a different type of tribe is unavoidable: the alternative being cultural statelessness. The new allegiances are drawn along axes other than ethnicity or dependence on one cultural patrimony or another. The willing, de-tribalized outcast immediately becomes an ‘antifascist’, a ‘feminist’, a radical free-marketeer, a ‘gender-bender’, a no-borders anarchist, a human rights advocate, an inner-city cosmopolitan, or a ‘chardonnay socialist’. Or any or all of them. These are the sirens that drown out any concept of home, culture, or civilisation. But the new abstract categories are no less tribes than the pseudo-religious cults that shore-up membership by vilifying outsiders and freezing all relations with them. Dialogue between xenophiles of this or that exotic culture is endlessly fascinating. But de-tribalised, Occidental, Postmodern Man — Hommo Nullius — has no conversation at all.

The American writer, Tom Wolfe, is described in this interview in Le Figaro, as an ethnologist of postmodern tribes — a profession that began in earnest in 1970 with the publication of Radical Chic.

Returning to the economist Thomas Piketty’s blog entry for 30th June, 2016, in Le Monde, he begins thus: “Let’s be honest: until dawn on 24 June 2016 nobody really believed that the British were going to vote for Brexit. Now that the disaster has struck, it is tempting to feel discouraged and to abandon any dream of a democratic and progressive re-foundation of Europe. However, we must persevere and live in hope, for we have no other choice: the rise of national self-seeking and xenophobia in Europe leads straight to disaster.” [The Europeans’ italics]. And then: “[…] there is something profoundly nihilist and irrational in this attitude of reverting to xenophobia, […]”